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Prune Whip (Cup sugar tablespoon lemon)
1/2 cup sugar ½ tablespoon lemon juice Pick over and wash prunes, then soak several hours in cold water to cover; cook in same water until soft; remove stones and rub prunes through a strainer, add sugar, and cook five minutes; the mixture should be of the consistency of marmalade. Beat whites of eggs until stiff, add prune mixture gradually when cold, and lemon juice. Pile lightly on buttered pudding-dish, bake twenty minutes in slow oven. Serve cold with Boiled Custard. 1¼ cups raspberries
The ingredient list on this page has been mangled in printing: the prunes and eggs never made it in, and the stray "1¼ cups raspberries" belongs to the recipe that followed. The method itself is complete and workable once you restore the quantities.
- Missing quantitiesThe prune and egg quantities have dropped out; only the 1/2 cup sugar and 1 1/2 tablespoons lemon juice survive. Comparable whips of the period use in the region of half a pound of dried prunes and the whites of four or five eggs, so something in that range will work. The trailing raspberry line appears to be a fragment of a neighbouring recipe and should be ignored.
- Slow ovenRoughly 300-325F. The point is to set the egg white without colouring or collapsing it; a hotter oven puffs the whip fast and then weeps as it cools.
- The hinge: add the purée coldThe instruction to cool the prune marmalade before folding it into the whites is the whole recipe. Warm purée slackens the foam on contact and the whip bakes into a dense, wet layer instead of a light one.
- Prunes todayModern pitted prunes are softer and wetter than the stone-in fruit this recipe assumes. A shorter soak, or none, is enough, and the puree may need a few extra minutes of cooking to reach marmalade thickness.
- Rubbing through a strainerA food mill or a few pulses in a processor does the same work. Keep some texture; a perfectly smooth purée tastes flat against the meringue.
- Baking dishAny buttered pudding dish large enough to take the mixture piled loosely rather than packed. Pressing the mixture down defeats the folding you just did.
- Doneness and eggsTwenty minutes in a slow oven sets a shallow whip through; a deep one may stay soft in the middle. If yours is thick, give it long enough that the centre is firm to the touch, or use pasteurized whites.
- Boiled CustardThe accompanying custard is a stirred custard of the creme anglaise type, thickened over low heat to somewhere around 175-180F. Much beyond that and it curdles.
- YieldA few modest servings, depending on the dish used, and it is meant to be served thoroughly cold.
Fruit whips were the thrifty end of the cold-dessert chapter in late nineteenth-century American cookery: dried fruit, sugar, and egg whites, with no cream, no gelatine and no ice required. Prunes in particular were a staple of the period pantry — cheap, shelf-stable, and heavily promoted by California growers as the state's orchards expanded in the 1880s and 1890s — and they turn up in school and institutional cookery of the era as much for their reputation as a healthful regulator as for their flavour. The dish shows the Boston Cooking School approach clearly: a purée cooked to a stated consistency, folded into a measured foam, baked at a named oven heat, and paired with a standard sauce from elsewhere in the book rather than a new one invented for the occasion.